With their high-tech facilities and devices, enterprises in the Zhongguancun National Innovation Demonstration Zone, dubbed "China's Silicon Valley," have made contributions to the successful Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games and epitomized the country's rising capabilities in science, technology, and innovation.

The opening ceremony for the 2022 Winter Olympics staged at Beijing's National Stadium on Feb. 4 amazed the world with its stunning visuals.

Leyard Group, headquartered in Zhongguancun, was among the major technology providers who worked together to ensure a realistic, dynamic, and immersive experience for everyone who watched.

At the opening ceremony, a drop of Chinese ink fell from the night sky, turned into a spectacular waterfall, and dropped down below. A massive water cube then emerged, which soon became a massive ice cube. Laser beams appeared to carve out the names of the previous 23 Winter Olympics hosts before ending with "Beijing, China."

Leyard produced and installed the 8K LED screens displaying the waterfall and the ice cube, sized 1,200 and 600 square meters, respectively, according to Huang Yifei, leader of the Winter Olympic project at the world-leading LED screen producer.

The company also supplied approximately 7,000 square meters of the world's biggest ground LED screen, used as the main stage of the opening ceremony. The screen, which is larger than 10,000 square meters, was composed of some 42,000 small LED modules.

In addition, another two screens installed at the northern and southern sides of the stadium were also provided by Leyard. Those four screens, together with other facilities, brought about glasses-free 3D effects and presented many memorable moments during the ceremony.

"The visual effects of the opening ceremony have set an excellent example of how LED displays can improve large-scale performances," Huang said in an interview on February 17.

"We believe the technology will help promote the development of the performing arts, as well as auxiliary equipment, video production, and other relevant industries," he added.

Aside from the opening ceremony, cutting-edge technologies developed in Zhongguancun also helped make the Winter Olympics more friendly and attractive during the sports events.

For example, with the help of a sign language virtual interpreting system, hearing-impaired people in China can better enjoy the competitions and tune into sports news.

Backed by an AI modeling system named WuDao 2.0, an AI sign language anchor provides real-time interpretation and broadcasting services during sports broadcasts.

WuDao2.0 was unveiled last June by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. Its 1.75 trillion parameters broke the previous record of 1.6 trillion parameters set by the Google Switch Transformer, both known in the AI industry as "super-large-scale pretraining models."

Supported by the Special Project of the Beijing Science and Technology Commission for the Winter Olympics, the sign language virtual interpreting system was jointly developed by Zhipu AI Co., Ltd, the Luster Technology Co., and BRTV.

Zuo Jiaping, senior vice-president of Zhipu AI Co., Ltd, said that more efforts are underway to improve the system, such as making the anchor's facial expressions and mouth shapes more human-like.

The system is also expected to facilitate sign language education in special schools for hearing-impaired children, she added.

In 2021, the total revenue of enterprises above designated size in Zhongguancun increased by over 20%, while the volume of contracted technology transactions grew by 10%.